My journey to establish myself in another country still feels so bizarre that I don't know how to most concisely tell it. I should start by apologizing for not updating this blog along the way, but the steady movement associated with bouncing up and down North America, along with the necessity of spending 50+ hours a week in front of my computer playing poker (the reason I moved to begin with), has made it hard to sort out my thoughts.
I went to Canada with my friend David, an online poker player in his 20s, who had also been living in Los Angeles when Black Friday took place. After the WSOP, we began looking for a place in Vancouver, but we were both still engulfed in a post-Black Friday hazy depression, and as a result our decision making ability was not in peak form. We clumsily rushed to sign a lease in a high-rise apartment in the Yaletown area of downtown Vancouver. Somehow, I overlooked two critical things I knew about myself--first, that I don't particularly like downtown, big city living, and second, that I abhor living in high-rise apartments. I managed to forget how unhappy I was when I spent a summer at the WSOP living in the Panorama Towers in Vegas.
Living 28 floors above the ground--in an apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows and a tiny slab of outdoor space for a "balcony" that compels you to contemplate the ease of jumping each time you step out onto it--feels completely unnatural to me and fairly scary. The apartment was bright, hot, and very loud, with a steady stream of construction noises filling the room during the day and the gamut of city sounds--sirens, dogs barking, drunk people yelling--at night. The ironic thing about living that high up in the sky is that it's actually far less quiet than living closer to the ground.
Despite the suboptimal apartment situation, and the residual and ongoing stress of uprooting our lives to come to a new country, we got ourselves set up relatively efficiently over the course of a week, getting most of what we needed for our apartment and office (chairs, a desk, bedding, coffee machine) and evertyhing we needed to get our PokerStars accounts re-opened--basically getting a bank account and utility bills in our names in addition to the lease. It was important to me to get set up before the WCOOP began in the first week of September, and I did, with a few days to dip my foot in the water and get back into the online poker groove.
Although I thoroughly detested our apartment and workspace, I was fortunate to have a very good month playing tournaments on PokerStars, winning a WCOOP event and generally easing back into the daily poker grind. David, on the other hand, could not "get it going." I consider him a better player than me for all intents and purposes, but it seemed he was not running good in the spots where it mattered, and while I was seeing steady chunks of profit, he slowly and steadily bled funds.
David was also focused on trying to arrange a more long-term plan for Canada, which added to his immediate stress level but promised to lend him more stability eventually. Whereas I was planning to stay only up to six months and then reevaluate my options (visitors may only stay in Canada six months without a visa), David had applied to school in Vancouver and was planning to get his student visa, have the contents of his storage pod delivered and establish a home for himself in Canada. He was even going on dates and had sorta kinda acquired a girlfriend.
On the Friday afternoon before the WCOOP main event, David left the apartment to drive to the border, where he expected to get his student visa and the come back to the apartment. He was under the impression that it would be no problem, since he had his school application and other documents in order. A few hours after he left the apartment, I got a text from David, saying they weren't letting him back in the country. I thought he was kidding, but he wasn't. Without getting too much into the details of his personal business, the customs official would not let him into the country three months before school started, because he could not demonstrate ties to the US. They told him to try again a week or so before school started. They knew David had his belongings in our apartment and eventually gave him 48 hours to retrieve them.
At this point, it seemed my best option was to move on, too. I had planned a visit back to LA after the WCOOP and did not want to risk the possibility that I would be denied re-entry into Canada when I came back the next week, with all my stuff stranded in a downtown apartment and no roommate to pack it up and send it back to me.
I liked Vancouver a lot as a city, and I was looking forward to making it work for the winter (I didn't even mind the overcast weather that was becoming prevalent towards the end of September), but our Canadian adventure was riddled with problems, and if I hadn't had a good month on the "virtual felt," I would consider it an unmitigated disaster. I played through the weekend, finishing strong with a profitable final Sunday of WCOOP. Then I packed up my computer, arranged for a rental car from Vancouver to Seattle and another from Seattle to Los Angeles. It was time to regroup and move on.
If the story reads disjointed and incomplete, that's because it's basically how it was. We went through a lot of expense and effort to establish ourselves in Canada, yet it never felt like a fully realized situation. When it all fell apart, it almost seemed like a fitting conclusion.
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In the next installment: driving through the Pacific Northwest back to California in a stuffed rental car, discovering Rosarito and establishing a new apartment in Mexico.